In Wildest Africa <+> 



succumb to the treacherous climate. But it his life was cut 

 short, how quickly the power of the Masai warriors was 

 broken, the very power that had so harassed him, and 

 made his journey so difficult and dangerous. That terrible 

 scourge, the cattle plague, probably introduced from 

 India, suddenly destroyed the greater part of the herds 

 of the Masai, and at the same time blotted out vast 

 numbers of the Masai themselves from the list of the 

 living. 



The fates of these pastoral people and of their 

 property (the countless herds of cattle) were so closely 

 bound together, and these warlike herdsmen had become 

 so dependant on their droves of cattle, that once these 

 were ruined they could not survive, but died in a few 

 days of famine. 



In the lapse of little more than a year the cattle plague 

 and the Black Death had swept over the Masai uplands. 

 Hungry vultures hovered over scenes of horror. The 

 herds of cattle fell under the strange pestilence. Agonised 

 by slow starvation, the herdsmen followed them to death. 

 I have often found lying together, in one narrow space, 

 the countless white bleached bones of the cattle and the 

 skull of their former owner. It would be an old camping- 

 ground, with its fence of thorns (zereba) long rotted 

 away, and it was now a strangely impressive Golgotha. 

 These heaps of bones, still to be seen in 1^97, were soon 

 after dissolved in dust and scattered by the winds. 



Where are the Masai of those days? 



Suddenly they stand boldly before me, as if they 

 had sprung up out of the ground ! It is no illusion. 



12 



